Thursday, November 1, 2007

British Programming Style

While attending ICFP 2007 in Freiburg, David Fox and I ate dinner with Norman Ramsey, Jeremy Gibbons and one other, whose name I now forget. Jeremy had brought us to the Heilige Geist (Holy Ghost) am Munsterplatz (cathedral square). Both the food and the company were great. David ordered the venison liver appetizer and I had the venison ragout, both of which were unusual and excellent. I taught the group how to play binary word search, which they took to quite readily. And, of course, we had a number of discussions about programming language research.

But the high point of the evening was a quiet remark made by Jeremy Gibbons. I have completely forgotten the context, but I vividly remember this sentence: